


hum along til the feeling's gone forever

by thelemonisinplay



Series: verity richardson cinematic universe (vrcu) [7]
Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28979871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelemonisinplay/pseuds/thelemonisinplay
Summary: She’s not sure she has much energy left to try, but then historically that’s always been a problem of hers, hasn’t it? Giving up too soon. Letting relationships die because it’s easier than putting the effort in.
Relationships: Douglas Richardson & Verity Richardson
Series: verity richardson cinematic universe (vrcu) [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2077494
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	hum along til the feeling's gone forever

**Author's Note:**

> i've been too nice to them. let's ruin it.
> 
> title from chinese satellite by phoebe bridgers, the soundtrack to my winter. my brain just latched on and hasn't let go yet.

She leaves, in the dark, because that’s what she’s good at. Running away from problems and never looking back.

Arguments with Mum in her teens, screaming matches that Verity always instigated that were never really _about_ anything, but ended with Verity slamming her bedroom door behind her. That strange boyfriend she’d had third year of uni who’d started talking about marriage six months in; she disappeared from Brighton up to Manchester after her exams were finished, didn’t tell him she was moving, blocked him everywhere.

Dad, of course.

It’s fucking cold outside. She’s only in a jumper, coat still in the back of the car where she’d chucked it after Dad had put the heating on. Stupid.

She wraps her arms around herself and speeds up. Maybe if she gets far enough away he’ll prove her right. Go home. And she’ll have an excuse to get on a train, delete his number, lock this year away as a failed experiment and return to the comfort of the hatred that came so easy in the early days.

Millie pops into her mind, but she pushes the thought away. She doesn’t want to be rational right now.

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket. She pulls it out, glances at it. Dad. Shoves it back in her pocket again. She doesn’t want him to know she’s noticed him calling.

It’s a bit embarrassing how quickly she’s reverted to this disappearing act. She’s much too old for it, really – she’d thought that the time with Phoebe had been a weird one-off, first time in years, a reaction to the surprise of letting her anger get the better of her. But here she is again.

Maybe it’s Dad. Maybe being around him is bad for her, maybe it’s just turning her back into an unbearable teenager, not quite able to hold back like she’s practiced for years. Channelling every emotion she doesn’t know how to deal with into rage instead of just hiding them quietly away until she’s alone.

Certainly this _particular_ reaction is because of Dad. Driving back to his from the cinema, Millie sat in the back seat, legs tucked underneath her, headphones in, watching some YouTube video or other. Dad had been telling Verity some anecdote or other about Air England, some stupid prank he and Herc had played on a First Officer, and she’d taken the opportunity to ask what had happened there. Why he’d lost his job.

It’s something she’s wondered for years. She vividly remembers that morning, Easter holidays, Year Seven. Mum coming in to break the news. And then the niggling question of _why_ for over a decade.

She wishes, now, stalking through Fitton in the dark, that she’d never asked the question.

In the beginning she’d assumed it had been a mistake or a random redundancy. At twelve she’d been full of confidence in her father. Later, she’d wondered if it was maybe the drinking, and in their tentative newness she’d been willing to forgive that. Alcoholism was an illness, after all. He maybe couldn’t have helped it, if it had been the drinking.

None of that, though.

An argument with Herc, something vicious and nasty. Smuggling. A betrayal.

It sounds like something out of a terrible big budget film.

She's spent all this time trying, _all_ this time pushing herself way out of her comfort zone trying to fix this relationship because she thought maybe it was better than the guilt, and because it seemed _worth_ it, because she'd seen her dad and thought maybe she'd be happier with him in her life than without.

Now?

Now she's furious, again on behalf of her twelve-year-old self. Furious that she was nothing more than a pawn in a stupid game, furious that she's spent all this time trying this hard for –

For what?

She’d said as much to him in the car, hissing so as not to attract Millie’s attention in the back, almost surprised by how easily it all slipped out. Accused him of recklessness, told him he’d clearly never changed, she’d heard the sugar brick story, he hadn’t protected her from his actions when she was little and he was here making the same dangerous mistakes with Millie –

She hadn’t got very far with that particular line of argument. That had wound him up, he’d thrown back something about not being able to argue on Millie’s behalf, seeing as _she’s_ the one who’d spent over a decade out of Millie’s life by choice.

It’s been ten, fifteen minutes since he said it, maybe, and out in the cold of Fitton’s night Verity’s run that particular line round her head probably a thousand times. Vicious, perhaps, but not untrue.

She’d ignored it at the time, though. Laughed. _Okay_ , she’d said, _well if I can’t talk about Millie, then how about me? Because over a decade on and I still struggle to be in a room with drunk men without panicking, and whose fault do you think that is?_

She’d had more to come, but Dad had screeched to a halt, pulled in on the side of the road, and Millie had pulled out a headphone to ask what was going on, and Verity had left the car without a word.

Which leaves her here: walking ever more aimlessly down random side streets of Fitton, wondering why she finds it so easy to tear apart her own life.

Her phone buzzes again.

Millie.

She stares at it for a moment, knowing that Dad's probably borrowed her phone, knowing he probably thinks she's more likely to answer for Millie than for him, and she wants to ignore it. She wants so _badly_ to ignore it.

But that line about choice echoes in her head, her choice to spend all those years out of Millie's life. And she feels every year of that guilt as she stares at her phone.

None of this is Millie's fault. And maybe she doesn't want anything to do with Dad right now, maybe not ever again, but she can't leave Millie again. Verity knows how easy it is to damage trust in a fourteen-year-old.

She answers the call.

"Hi, Millie," she says down the phone, voice as casual as she can make it.

"Verity! Hi! Where are you?"

Millie sounds panicked, and Verity wonders what Dad's said to her. Wonders, too, if she'd heard anything of the argument through her headphones. They’d got loud towards the end.

"Oh, don't worry about me, Millie, you just go home."

"But - your coat's here. It's freezing."

That, for some reason, is what makes the tears start. Verity's not a crier as a rule, certainly not in public. She can count on one hand the number of people who have seen her cry in the last twenty years. But for some reason the sweet softness of her little sister looking out for her instead of accusing her of abandonment pushes her over the edge in the middle of a residential street in the dark.

"It's fine," Verity says, desperately clinging to as much normality as she can force into her voice. "I've been walking, I'm warm, don't worry about me."

"You're not _going_ , are you? Your stuff's all at Dad's."

Verity has her phone, card details saved onto the browser. She can easily buy a train ticket, two hours on the train, walk back home from the station, call Phoebe to let her in. Her keys are at Dad's, along with her bank card, some cash, some clothes, but none of that matters. She can survive without that. She can get a new key cut - or tell the estate agents, pay whatever it costs to have the locks changed, just to avoid Dad being able to get in. (Would he do that? She doesn't _think_ so, but how well does she know him, really?)

She wants to. Desperately wants to. But Millie's on the phone, sounding so lost, and Verity can't bring herself to subject her sister to the worst parts of herself.

"I'll walk back," she says. She can't get back in the car, not like this, silent tears and apologetic. She can't let Dad see her like this. Can't let him know he's got to her.

Millie doesn't say anything.

"I _promise_ ," says Verity.

"Be back by nine," says Millie, the smallest voice Verity's ever heard from her, and then she hangs up.

Verity slips down a small, empty alleyway, leans against a wall, and tries in vain to control the sobs escaping from her.

She wipes her face, eventually. Glances at her phone. Ten to nine, and she has no idea where she is, no idea how long it'll take to get back to Dad's, and no way to make herself look normal in that time. Even a pack of tissues to wipe up her face would do, but she keeps those in her coat pocket.

She does as best she can with her hands, wincing at the cold fingers on her face. Opens the map on her phone. It's a fifteen minute walk, apparently, but they always overestimate. Plus she's cold, and walking quickly will warm her up. She might still be able to make it.

But it's dark, and everything looks different at night, and she misreads a few road signs, takes a few wrong turns before she ends up on the right street, by which time it's almost ten past.

 _Can't even get home on time for your sister after a lifetime of absence_ , says a voice, Dad's voice, in her head. Verity pauses, halfway down the road, because if she can't even make it on time then is it even worth turning up? Millie might have given up on her in the ten minutes she's spent going the wrong way, and Millie's the only person she wants to see right now.

Maybe she should go back to the station after all.

She turns around halfway down the road. Changes her mind, turns back. Walks further down until she's almost at Dad's. The lights are on downstairs, curtains closed. The bedroom upstairs, top right, is Millie's room. Lights off.

Maybe Millie _is_ still waiting downstairs for her, then.

Verity takes a deep breath. Runs her hand around her eyes again, removing any evidence of tears. And then she opens the door.

"Hi," says Millie. She's sat on the stairs, still in her shoes and coat, phone clutched in her hand, staring at the door.

"I got lost. I'm sorry," says Verity, but it sounds hollow even to her.

Millie nods. Frowns, looking intently at Verity. "Are you okay? Dad said –"

"Don't tell me." Verity sits on the step below her sister, face in her hands. "I don't want to know."

"He said he was horrible to you," says Millie. "He kept telling me he was sorry. He – oh, he dropped me home and went back out to look for you, let me call him."

Verity glances through the window to the driveway, which is empty. She hadn't even noticed, too focused on her own uncertainty to pay attention to her surroundings. That does explain why she's not seen him yet, though.

She overhears the end of Millie's phone call, the assurance that everything's fine, that he should come back.

Verity wants to go to bed, hide in her room, not face her father until the morning and pretend none of this has happened. But that's not fair. Millie's the only person acting like a grown up right now, fourteen years old, mediating her father and her adult sister. Verity doesn't want that, can't make that particular mistake when she so strongly remembers her own childhood stuck in the middle of adults who couldn’t get along. She can’t now force that role onto Millie.

"Take your coat off, Millie," she says instead. "I'll make you a drink. We can watch something, if you want."

"I think I'm gonna go to bed when Dad gets in," Millie says. It’s fair, of course, but all Verity can see is the cracks in their relationship deepening, the cracks that had been there as soon as they'd met, that Verity hadn't taken the time to pay attention to, too overwhelmed with how new it all was.

"Okay," says Verity, because she doesn't know what else to say. How do you build trust after so long apart? Like Dad had said, it had been her own choice, ultimately. And maybe she'd only been thirteen years old in the beginning, but that excuse won’t stand forever. She’s not thirteen anymore.

The door opens, then, and Verity resists the urge to get up and run. She doesn't want to be here for this. But she can’t leave.

Millie stands, pulls off her coat, leaves it on the bannister. Chucks her shoes down to the bottom of the stairs.

"I'm going to bed," she announces once Dad's closed the door behind him. "Night."

Verity doesn't move from her seat on the stairs, head back in her hands, fighting back tears for the second time this evening. Things had been so much easier when she didn't _care_ , when she thought of herself as an only child and only remembered there was a whole side of her family she didn't see when people asked about her dad.

It's funny how often people do that, even in adulthood. It always surprises Verity to be asked, but she's had a pre-prepared evasive answer stored up for years.

She feels, rather than sees, Dad join her on the stairs.

"Hi, darling," he says. He doesn't try to touch her, which is a small blessing, but Verity still finds herself shuffling away from him.

The anger's faded now, to something more like a quiet resignation. She can't run away from him again, not without losing Millie. And she doesn't _want_ to, not entirely, because in truth she likes having him around. Things are so good, when they're both in the right mood, when things come easily and they can laugh and joke and tease. But she's so tired of trying.

"I'm sorry," he offers when she doesn't say anything. Pathetic, really. What's she supposed to say to that?

"I'm sorry I couldn't pay for your school. I'm sorry about the drinking. I'm –"

"It's fine," she says into her hands, though of course it isn't. She just has no idea where to even begin here – she could talk to Millie about that time because Millie hadn't been there, because it was just a story for Millie. She's still learning to even look at Dad without becoming overwhelmed with the sheer amount of emotion there. And how do you untangle hurts so old they've become part of who you are? How do you make those right?

"No, it's not," says Dad. "None of what I said to you in the car was fair. And none of what I _did_ was fair, back then."

Verity shrugs. It's been almost fifteen years now since he was fired and set off the chain of events that led them here. Less than one since they reconnected. A big gaping hole in her life where a father should be, and then the two of them trying to fit together whilst pretending the hole isn’t there. Until today.

They're both very good at pretending.

"I always thought the drinking was what did it in the end," he says. "Course, your mum thought there was more to it than that, but once I was sober I could see the damage I'd been doing to ... well, everyone."

"Millie said you thought it was the drinking," says Verity. She doesn't intend to say anything really, is just aware that Dad is using a lot of words to say absolutely nothing, and she wants him to stop.

"Millie?"

"She asked me about why I'd not really been involved in her life before."

"Ah," says Dad. "Well, yes, that's what I told her when she asked me. I spent a lot of time when you were away thinking about all those arguments with Emily, the storming out of the house and coming back barely able to walk ..."

"Don't." Verity's spent enough of her life thinking about those nights, she doesn't want someone else's perspective on them. What she wants to ask is whether the sobriety was entirely inspired by the unborn baby, or whether he'd also wanted to protect _her_ from himself. But she's already asked one question tonight that she thought she wanted the answer to, and look where that's got her.

"Sorry."

The apology sits between them for a moment, not the first of the night or the first of the year. It won't be the last, either: even if they leave the past behind them forever, Verity and Dad are both too prone to secrets and lies, to overconfidence and pride and hurting people. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose.

"I remember when you came in, the first time," says Verity. She's not sure why she's saying this, not sure she decided to do so, but it's coming out. "It was just before I started the new school, and I was at yours for the weekend, and you and Emily argued. I'd never heard you like that, either of you. You and Mum arguing was never vicious like that. And then you disappeared, and Emily sat with me, tried to talk to me but she never really knew how, and I sat up waiting for you to come home, and it was nearly midnight before you came in, I think. And I just remember ... you could barely stand. I thought you were really ill. I tried to ask if you were okay, and you didn't even notice that I was there, you just dragged yourself to the toilet. I sat listening to you throw up into it for hours."

The silence after that is too much, goes on for too long. Verity doesn’t know what she wants him to say, if anything. So she does what she does best.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, and heads upstairs without stopping to take off her shoes.

Part of her wants him to follow, to call up, to say _something_. But he doesn’t.

She wakes early in the morning, surprisingly; she’d spent hours lying awake staring into nothing and hopelessly Googling articles on how to fix something so impossibly broken. She’d thought, around two, of getting up and going downstairs for a change of scenery, but she’d decided against it. Hadn’t wanted to risk seeing Dad in the honesty of the dark.

Seven thirty.

She can tell immediately that she’s not getting back to sleep, so she gives up and goes downstairs to make herself a cup of tea.

Millie’s up already, pouring cereal into a bowl.

“Hi,” says Verity softly. She pauses at the door to the kitchen, not wanting to interrupt if Millie wants space – she can always go back to her room.

“Hi,” says Millie, and she’s smiling. Not her usual wide grin, but Verity will take what she can get.

“I’m sorry about last night. Dad and I shouldn’t have put you in the middle of us like that. It won’t happen again.”

Millie shrugs. “It’s fine. I’ve been in the middle of worse arguments.”

Verity wonders if Dad’s even aware of this pattern of his, dragging his daughters into disagreements and using them as shields. All this time she’s been forcing herself to focus on the good, because it’s so much easier to _try_ that way, but maybe that’s not how you build a relationship.

She wants to tell Millie that it’s not fine, that she deserves better than this broken family who’ll do nothing but hurt her, in the end, but then she can hear the stairs creaking as someone comes down them. She can’t say that in front of Dad.

“Morning, girls,” he says, popping his head into the kitchen. He’s calm. Too calm. And Verity doesn’t want to bring up last night, doesn’t want to hash out the details of exactly how and why he hurt her, and how and why she hurt him back, but she also doesn’t want him pretending that nothing’s happened. That’s how they got here in the first place.

She sends a nod his way but can’t quite muster up speech, and moves herself into the next room. She can drink her tea on the sofa.

She hears steps on the stairs again, assumes he’s left to shower, and when she hears somebody pause at the corner of the room she lazily pats the seat next to her, presuming it’s Millie.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says when Dad sits beside her instead.

“I don’t think I ever understood exactly what I put you through,” he says, carefully. “And maybe I never will. And I know that Arthur thinks I can fix everything, but I have no idea where to start, here.”

Arthur. From MJN. It’s a strange reference to make. Dad talks about him both fondly and with incredulity, and Verity’s wondered sometimes in her darker moments if he’s just a surrogate for the daughters Dad can’t help but fail.

“I don’t know,” says Verity. She really doesn’t. It feels like maybe they set themselves up to fail. Maybe they’ll just distance from each other, stop calling so often, remain cautiously polite around Millie because neither of them can afford to lose her.

“I want to try, though,” says Dad.

“Okay,” says Verity. She’s not sure she has much energy left to try, but then historically that’s always been a problem of hers, hasn’t it? Giving up too soon. Letting relationships die because it’s easier than putting the effort in. It’s a wonder she’s still in touch with anybody from uni, let alone Phoebe.

“Okay. Good.”

He moves to get up, presumably thinking that Verity isn’t much in the mood for chat – and to be fair she isn’t, exactly. But she does want to say one thing.

“You need to talk to Millie. She was the only one of us acting like an adult last night, and I won’t do that to her. You can’t hold a fourteen-year-old responsible for your relationships with other people.”

Verity doesn’t look at Dad, doesn’t turn to see his expression, but she hears him leave the room and make his way back upstairs, hears a gentle knock on a bedroom door. Good. That’s one victory she can claim.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you as ever to my enablers & co-conspirators in verity richardson hell, GnomeIgnominius & timeladyleo <3 there is so much intricate lore to this universe now and it's all coming back to cause problems :)


End file.
